A Favor Among Strangers Becomes a Moral Battle

Questions of life and death are settled over pots of tea in Lee Blessing's "Going to St. Ives," which opened last night at the 59E59 Theaters in an assured, strongly acted production from Primary Stages.

In this thoughtful, tidy two-hander, Mr. Blessing returns to the formula of his best-known play, "A Walk in the Woods," in which the United States-Soviet arms race was examined through the sharply focused lens of a friendly colloquy between a pair of refugees from the negotiations sharing some quality time on a park bench.

Here, too, Mr. Blessing sets out to ponder troublesome questions of personal ethics, global politics and moral responsibility through the interplay of two characters trading confidences and viewpoints across a wide cultural divide. The big mess under the microscope on this occasion is the widespread violence that continues to roil much of postcolonial Africa.

The lights rise to reveal the commanding presence of May N'Kame (L. Scott Caldwell), swathed in richly colored African fabrics accented by a tasteful pair of Chanel flats (a witty stroke from the costume designer, Ann Hould-Ward). Radiating grandeur and authority, her lips pursed permanently in mild disdain, May looks absurdly out of place in the bland parlor of Dr. Cora Gage (Vivienne Benesch), a respected British eye surgeon.

May has come to St. Ives, a village near Cambridge, England, to put herself in Dr. Gage's care. Her fading eyesight troubles her son, the self-styled emperor of an unnamed African nation. "Why do men build empires, if not to show their mothers?" May asks, revealing a tendency to deliver aphorisms as if they were edicts.

The violent tactics May's son uses to keep a ruthless grip on power in the former British colony are not fondly regarded by the West. May assumes Cora's nervousness is inspired by her trepidation at sharing an afternoon meal with, and performing delicate surgery on, "the mother of a monster," as May bluntly puts it. But Cora's anxieties run deeper. She has decided to ask May to encourage her son to release four doctors he has jailed for treason. Their crime? Refusing to revive prisoners so their captors could continue to torture them.

As she ponders the request, the philosophically minded May draws a reluctant Cora into a discussion of the personal histories that have brought them together. We learn that Cora is haunted by guilt over her role in her young son's death. He was the accidental victim of gang violence the family encountered when they took a wrong turn off a freeway in Los Angeles. May, in turn, reveals an anguished ambivalence toward her son, comparing her heart, with its remnant of affection for a man whose behavior she despises, to a "burnt-out forest."

"People wander through looking for pity, sympathy -- there's nothing there," she continues. "Only this one, unwelcome love." (May, who had a "surprising education" in England, easily bests Cora in the rhetorical department.)

Mr. Blessing springs a sharp surprise in the first act, as May promises to honor Cora's request only if the doctor will in turn grant a favor that puts Cora in an ethically dubious position. In the play's second act, set in Africa six months later, Mr. Blessing explores the ramifications of their initial meeting in both women's lives. Another pot of tea is consumed as Cora once again seeks to draw May into a mutually beneficial pact, this time in an atmosphere more fraught with danger and consequence.

Mr. Blessing is a fluid, articulate writer with a knack for domesticating seemingly unruly subject matter. In "Going to St. Ives," he wraps the knotty moral issues at hand in a pleasingly neat, dramatic package. We are allowed to ponder a variety of seriously weighty subjects -- the violent legacy of colonialism, the responsibility of Western governments to confront the carnage in Africa, the moral argument for sacrificing one life to save many without breaking into a sweat, or even straying from the soothing presence of a teapot. Mr. Blessing doesn't go in for the impassioned polemics, and fearless dramatic sprawl, of a writer like Tony Kushner, or the oblique abstractions of Caryl Churchill, to name two writers with a similar interest in matters of global import.

But this level head is not exclusively an asset. The play's structural and thematic niceties, the careful manner in which Mr. Blessing sets up unexpected correspondences between the lives of his two disparate characters, for instance, are intellectually pleasing, but they also impart a hollow, manufactured quality. And the characters' effortless eloquence drains some of the life from them. Intricately drawn though they are, May and Cora never truly come across as flesh-and-blood people but as convincing facsimiles whose turns of thought and phrase are all preordained by the playwright.

Still, under the painstaking direction of Maria Mileaf, both Ms. Benesch and Ms. Caldwell freshen the writing with the immediacy of their performances. Ms. Caldwell, in the richer role, rises magnificently to the challenges of the second act. In a particularly affecting monologue, she recounts the ruthless manner in which her young son's humanity was systematically destroyed by his years at a military academy. And she is simply riveting in the play's climactic moments. As May reckons with her complicity in the murderous acts of her son, she is left literally gasping with despair. Many in the audience will find themselves breathless, too.